Posts Tagged ‘World of Warcraft’

Looking For Group, a new World of Warcraft documentary, is as earnest as the late Jim Varney. It’s a sixty minute reflection on the first ten years of the giant of MMORPGs and as it was created in-house at Blizzard, it’s all about the good times. Creators and players alike fondly reminisce and the whole thing almost collapses into a blackhole of backslapping self-aggrandisement around the forty minute mark, when a kung fu panda is held up as an example of the maturing narratives tastes of the WOW audience. But despite the fluff, I found my cynicism thawing as I watched. The whole thing is embedded below.

“Celebrate 10 years of adventure, camaraderie, and /dancing on mailboxes all around Azeroth. Explore the history of WoW with its creators, and journey into corners of Blizzard and the WoW community you’ve never seen before.”

Preparations for the Warlords of Draenor expansion to World of Warcraft continues. Yesterday brought The Iron Tide, the traditional pre-expansion patch with all its many changes. Now Blizzard have done the other now-traditional thing and folded the last expansion’s content into the base World of Warcraft game. That means subscribers who never bought Mists of Pandaria no longer need to, as its landmass and quests are available to all.

I returned to World of Warcraft earlier this year on the encouragement of a few online friends. I hadn’t played since the release of Mists of Pandaria in late 2012 and hadn’t paid attention to the game’s systems since the end of Cataclysm’s life cycle. It was an odd experience; a game that I find in some ways intimately familiar, made strange through numerous small changes. Not bad, just different.

I’ll be feeling that again come October 14th, when the pre-expansion patch for Warlords of Draenor – called 6.0.2: The Iron Tide – is released and everything is different again. These patches bring the systemic and mechanical changes of the expansion to the game, and set the scene for the new expansion’s big bad with new world events.

Blizzard usually throw a birthday party for World of Warcraft, but are really indulging their love of pomp and nostalgia as the MMORPG hits double digits. WoW’s 10th anniversary celebrations will bring a level-100 version of the classic Molten Core raid and a new PvP battleground based on old favourite murderzones Tarren Mill and Southshore. Having a bash at those will get players special mounts and gear, but even simply logging in during the festivities (between November 21st and January 5th) will get you that adorable molten corgi pet up there.

I’ve spoken about the Blizzard cinematic siren before and it has gone off again. Yesterday evening at an event in Los Angeles (which, for some reason, was then simulcast to the Blizzard booth at Gamescom rather than just being ran there) the titanic MMO developer showed off the CGI intro to Warlords of Draenor, the next World of Warcraft expansion. Blizz announced its release date–November 13th–and spoke about what’s coming in the expansion itself. They also showed off the first episode of their new animated series about the eponymous Warlords. Find it all below.

That headline might be confusing for some of you, so allow me to elaborate: Rob Pardo’s been one of Blizzard’s top designers for 17 years, making him – among many other things – one of Diablo‘s many daddies. So when I say the devil cries, I’m mostly referring to that. I’m sure he’s blowing his 666 nostrils into a +44 WIS Hanky Of Wretched Despondency as we speak, the poor primeval force.

That, however, is only the beginning of Pardo’s legendary ledger, which spans everything from the original StarCraft to Warcraft III to World of Warcraft to Diablo III. He’s been everywhere (as lead designer or chief creative officer for a lot of it), worked on projects great and not-so-great. And now he’s leaving.

In case you’d forgotten, MMO players are crazy. I know: I used to be one. This, though, is a whole new level of dedication to a mind-numbingly repetitive task. A World of Warcraft player named “Doubleagent” (get it?) rolled a Pandaren character and never left the neutral starting zone. Somehow, though, they found a way to hit WoW’s current level cap of 90. And by somehow, I mean they picked a lot of herbs and mined Azeroth hollow. This is not a task congruent with keeping one’s sanity, but when somebody voluntarily sets out to do this, it makes you wonder if they were ever truly sane to begin with.

The wonder and terror of collectible card games is that they evolve and expand over time to continue demanding your time and money and attention and love and it’s just too much and I can’t deal with it, as I may have mentioned earlier today. Blizzard are hooked into this cruel cycle with Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, and today announced the first major addition to its virtual CCG since last month’s launch.

Hearthstone will kick off its single-player Adventure Mode with Curse of Naxxramas, an adaptation of a raid from World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. Expect boss battles, new cards to collect, and new ways to pay.

At what point does a microtransaction cease to be a microtransaction? It’s a question that’s plagued my more contemplative brain tubules for years now, twisting the follicles of my whiskey soaked beard until they snap. But finally, I think I have an answer: when it’s the price of a full goddamn game. We already knew that World of Warcraft‘s Warlords of Draenor expansion would bring with it the option to boost one of your characters straight to level 90, but what if you don’t want the expansion or need another boost (come on, man – just one more that’s it I promise)? Well, do you have $60 you’re prepared to fling into Blizzard’s abyssal bank account? Are… are you sure?

Received wisdom tends to be that World of Warcraft is a game in slow decline, still very much a going concern but nonetheless the last great dinosaur of the subscription MMO. Turns out that’s not quite the case – while its 12 million+ subscriber glory days might be behind it, its global population is ever so slightly on the rise. That didn’t stop owner Activision losing a wee bit of money over the last year, though.Read the rest of this entry »

And so it all comes full circle. Blizzard’s games may have been the MOBA genre’s none-too-pretty spawning pit, but League of Legends, DOTA 2, and the like took the torch – whether Blizzard wanted to pass it or not. So it’s not entirely surprising to see people like Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, former lead systems designer on World of Warcraft, at Riot. Sure, Heroes of the Storm is a thing, but it’s still nascent, larval. For better or worse, LoL is an empire, and now, it seems, a destination. Street enters as lead game designer on LoL, so he will likely be calling quite a few shots as time goes on.

I’m not quite ready to declare privacy dead, but it’s reeeeeeeeeallly not doing so well in this day and age. Each racking cough brings up phlegmy handfuls of news about intrusive government and corporate programs – not to mention services that have normalized broadcasting every aspect of our lives on public channels without really considering the consequences. Admittedly, I don’t think it’s all bad (I use Twitter and Facebook all the time; I have no one but myself to blame for that), but many initiatives are absolutely overstepping our boundaries and rights. The NSA, especially, has hit a rather frightening point-of-no-return, and unsurprisingly, it’s taken to snooping around inside games on top of, you know, pretty much everything else.